no, but this crop of useless players did, time for a change. the coach is the one who motivates players, instills that extra bit of confidence, the person who you'd run through brick walls for. you'd be lucky to see the great majority of this england squad run through a wet sheet of paper!

Wayne Bennett couldn't turn this England side around. A no mark coach like Smith hasn't got a hope in hell of doing it.

One of Smith's strengths as a SL coach was that he got Leeds playing error free rugby. That is essential at international level where errors get punished. I had hoped he would bring the same discipline to England but sadly he couldn't.

Sadly there were too many players such as Leon Pryce who have performed well in SL but simply could not cope with the additonal intensity at international level. This calls into question whether SL provides enough intensity. The differences in refereeing is an issue for me. This year in SL the players have been conditioned to move away from the tackle immediately and yet in the WC Australia and NZ and been allowed to lie on that extra couple of seconds. If we are to have a stronger world competition then this sort of thing needs to be resolved. Do we need to have more movement of referees between the countries to avoid this competition centric bias?

I am not using referees or the coach as an excuse. These are just a couple of factors. The fundamental issue is that the players are just not skillful and game wise enough.

I worry that SL is allowing far too many foreign players into the teams and this is not in the long term interest of a strong international comp. There should be no more than 3 players on any team that are not eligible for a GB team.

In my view Smith has been naive to think he could take the players who excel in SL and expact them to dominate in the same way that they dominate in SL.

How were we expecting to release our spring heeled slightly built 2nd row forwards and inject Pryce into the game when the defence always has an extra 2 seconds to get organised.

We should have sorted out the pathetic refereeing policy before the tournament started, or realised that we were going to be playing to different rules and planned accordingly - not two weeks into the competiton.

He was however let down by a number of players making far too many errors when the reality was that we again handed the game to the kiwis rather than them earning it.

I don't normally call for the coach's head, because I've been there - albeit at a much lower level - and know much of what happens isn't his fault. But the bottom line here is we took out a well-paid, comfortably looked-after squad, and played very badly in four successive games in the World Cup. One game you can put down to bad form, but four has to be the coach's fault. Some of the errors we saw weren't just low-skill mistakes by individual players, but poor understanding of defensive positions, poor attacking plays, and poor selections (how Wellens was selected again today is beyond me). Smith has failed just as badly as his players. If I was Lewis, I'd sack him.

The next coach needs to be appointed on his COACHING ABILITY!



You lot keep falling into the trap of appointing coaches on their Super League records.


FFS, Ian Millward and Shaun McRae have amazing record in SL....but no one has ever accused them of being even decent coaches!

According to Ceefax Richard Lewis has given TS the dreaded vote of confidence - start on those CVs now, everyone!

YES Smith MUST go.

The players consistently looked confused when defending on their own line. Yes, there were players on the field who in better times would never get near an international cap but they should still be (and are) good enough to beat NZ.

Smith buggered up the defence and couldn't correct the mess he'd created during the tournament. For that reason alone he has no place left with the England / GB team. You cannot reward abject failure.

We should appoint a new coach who is given the job until after the next WC (by the way Tony that stands for World Cup, not sh*thouse) and then he plans his campaign from now. No point in putting a new man in a year or so beforehand. Let's take a longer term, more professional view. But, please have some pride and appoint an Englishman. By appointing an Australian who would not be appointed head coach at any NRL club you are sending a message to the players that we are vastly inferior to the team we have to beat to win something.

Worst series of performances from the national side since the early 80s.

SMITH OUT!!!

To be fair, though, Richard Lewis wouldn't be Richard Lewis if he had done any differently, would he? He's the consumate professional administrator is Dickie L. However, give it time over here once they're all back and things may change - though not to be debated publically, of course. That would not be cricket (or tennis, in Dickie L's case).

Smith has to go though. He had all that time to get to know players, get to pick them, to bond them, to do everything he fecking wanted with them, but they looked like a pack of blokes he'd picked off the street they were so not a team.

There was an excuse then. The Australians had reinvented the game and we hadn't realised it (although it was there for all to see in 3rd Test at Headingley in 197icon_cool.gif. We were part time, they much more professional.

This time, there's no such excuse. We've remodelled the game, gone professional but are even further behind.

Is it that we are further behind or that the two games have evolved differently?

Smith will resign

It's irrelevant. We are looking less and less likely to beat Australia as time goes by.

On the last Ashes Tour over here, we lost two games narrowly. Frustrating, but you felt that we were close, and a psychological difference was probaly what split the sides more than huge amounts of talent. Since then, we've gone backwards fast in relation to the Aussies. Every single man on that Aussie team was beter than his opposite number. 5 years ago, a sensible pundit could suggest half a dozen Brits who would get into the Aussie side. This year, maybe Peacock as a second-row grunt. Maybe.

The situation in our backline from 1-7 is atrocious. I hate how old this makes me sound, but I've been watching rugby for 25 years now, and I have never seen a set of backs so utterly devoid of world class talent. Compared to Newlove, Davies, Offiah, Gibbs, Connolly, Radlinski in his pomp, Edwards, Goulding etc this lot are woeful. Everyone over 30 will recognise how dire it is that I can say this confidently, but if Alan Hunte was playing now, he'd be the best winger in this country by such a distance that Stevo would be tossing off over him. Sculthorpe and Farrell had their detractors (usually wearing either Wigan or Saints shirts), but they were beter backs than any of our lads on this tour, and they were actually both forwards.